BlaBlaCar

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One of the advantages of Valencia as an Erasmus city is that you can travel around very cheaply, thanks to BlablaCar. BlaBlaCar is a concept that exists in various countries: Spain, Italy, France, Poland, Portugal and United Kingdom. You can share a car with other people if they need to make the same journey as you and you only have to pay petrol costs. It can be a short or long-distance journey. Through BlaBlaCar, you can travel cheaply and get to know new people at the same time!

Firstly, you need to sign up on the web-page for the country you want to travel in (it could be your own country or your Erasmus country, like it was in my case! ). It is completely free to sign up and you can use BlaBlaCar without a cut off time. You create your profile and write a lot of things so that the other travellers can get to know you before travelling with you. At the end of the day, this is what you want the others to do for you, right? In my opinion, it is better to put a photo up too, for the same reasons that I wrote before - it is less strange travelling with strangers if you have seen their face before!

The second step is to choose whether you are a driver or a passenger. This is so that you can find the correct people on search. If you are a driver, it will be a lot cheaper to travel, for example going from Valencia to Madrid via car sharing the costs with three people, rather than doing the whole journey and paying the petrol costs alone! Then, as a driver, you write a short advert, with your concrete dates of travel and then the details (time, place where you are going to end up at the final destination etc. ). You can also put down you preferences: you only travel with non-smokers, you don't allow pets in the car, that you listen to music while driving, that you don't want them to talk to you while driving as you can't concentrate on the road etc. Also, you have to put down the type of car you're driving: the brand and model. You also put a picture of the car and have to put down how comfortable it is for the passengers so that the travellers know this information before deciding to travel with you. Imagine a really tall person travelling for like 5 hours in a car with limited leg space. This wouldn't be a good option for them, so then they need to know this before reserving a seat in your car!

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On the other hand, if you are someone who wants to travel, but you don't have a car, put the dates and details of your trip into the BlaBlaCar website. For example: I'm 1 person and I am looking for a car to travel on the 3rd of April from Barcelona to Valencia, with a return journey on the 7th of April. You can put whether you are flexible with this journey or not. For example, if you are going to stay at a friends house, so you haven't already reserved set dates at a hostel, then you are not going to mind, more or less, if there is not a driver available on a Friday evening for your return trip but there is the next day, Saturday morning. After entering your dates, a list of drivers will appear on the page that you have open. It is possible that you won't travel with the same driver for the outgoing and return journey. This depends on your choices and what you have entered on the page, according to the dates and times of each one of them. As a traveller, you have to give all of the information that the driver asks for before they accept you to travel in their car. For example, if you are travelling with a dog or cat, you have to let them know! As maybe they could be allergic or simply not want pets in their car, so it is their right to know that, it is not good to not let them know something so important. Also, if there are lots of drivers that can take you to your destination, you have to decide who you are going to go with according to other criteria, for example, music etc. Also, if you prefer to talk to pass the time during the driver, you have to choose someone who has the picture with "BlaBla" on their BlaBlaCar page and this means that they like to talk during a long car journey. Recently, BlaBlaCar Spain has established one more option, just travelling with girls. This is for the more closed-off or shy girls, ideal for me, as at best I feel more comfortable with other girls, given that we are going to do a journey of several hours and that they will be with people that they've never met before. Perhaps, this can make you feel a bit safer and you can feel more comfortable in the car! I haven't used this option if I had used BlaBlaCar more often, I'm sure that I would have.

I have only used BlaBlaCar once, to travel from Barcelona to Valencia. I think that this was the journey that I made more times than any other. Most of my trips from Greece were to Barcelona because it worked out cheaper and therefore I used all kinds of public transport:

• Bus (if you have the student card, it costs around 20-25 euros) and takes 4 hours or a bit more
• Train, which takes a bit less than 4 hours and you can find really good deals (sometimes 16-18 euros with a student card! ) which is really cheap, especially because this price also includes the metro ticket from Barcelona train station to Barcelona airport.
• But yes, once I also went with BlaBlaCar!

It only cost me 16 euros and I met some people, close to my age who were really nice: Carlos, the driver, who was 26 years old and comes from Barcelona, but studies in Valencia. Ana, from Barcelona as well, works in Valencia and found Carlos through the BlaBlaCar website. The third person was called Maria and she was an Erasmus student like me, but from Berlin, Germany. All the others had used BlaBlaCar several times and I was the only one who was using it for the first time. It was a really nice experience and I really liked being able to travel so cheaply. I wasn't as tired as when I travelled via bus or train - there was only a few of us and we had a chilled journey, listening to music and talking a little bit about our lives in Spain.

I definitely recommend using BlaBlaCar, as much in Spain as in other countries where it is available. I am going to use it during my next trip to one of those countries! I wish that we had it in Greece too - it would be an incredible solution for the trips that I do very often from Northern Greece to the centre to visit my friends and family there!

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